Sure, you could experience the Beat sensibility on film by watching The Beat Generation.
But why settle for that high-gloss Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature
treatment when you can get an unadulterated half-hour chunk of the real
thing above, in Pull My Daisy?

That Kerouac himself provides all the narration assures us we’re
watching a movie fully committed to the Beat mindset.

“Early morning in
the universe,” he says to set the opening scene. “The wife is gettin’
up, openin’ up the windows, in this loft that’s in the Bowery of the
Lower East Side of New York. She’s a painter, and her husband’s a
railroad brakeman, and he’s comin’ home in a couple hours, about five
hours, from the local.”

Kerouac’s ambling words seem at first like one improvisational element of many.

In fact, they provided the production’s only element
of improvisation: Frank and company took pains to light, shoot, script,
and rehearse with great deliberateness, albeit the kind of
deliberateness meant to create the impression of thrown-together,
ramshackle spontaneity.

But if the kind of careful craft that made Pull My Daisy
seems not to fit within the anarchic subcultural collective persona of
the Beats, surely the premises of its story and the consequences thereof
do.

The aforementioned brakeman brings a bishop home for dinner, but
his exuberantly low-living buddies decide they want in on the fun.

Or if
there’s no fun to be had, then, in keeping with what we might identify
as Beat principles, they’ll create some of their own. Or at least
they’ll create a disturbance, and where could a Beat possibly draw the
line between disturbance and fun?